Lorimer and the Edinburgh Craft Designers [Paperback]

His talents were wide and he applied them to arts and crafts cottages, which received wide attention; to large baronial mansions and to country house restorations, which were well reviewed by the magazines; to the furniture he designed, to garden layouts and to overseas war cemeteries; but his last masterpiece was the Scottish National War Memorial in Edinburgh, which became the focus of a national pilgrimage in 19Z7. His most eminent pupil wrote after his death in 1929 that Lorimer was ‘the last of the great romantics, with a name to put beside that of Philip Webb and Norman Shaw. Like these, a revivalist; like these, a modernist; it was given to him, as to them, to leave the land he loved so well more beautiful in a thousand places than he found it.’

When it first came out, this was the first book for over forty years to deal with the work of Lorimer and the talented group of artists and craftspeople gathered around him.

A general interest in conservation and in garden design led him to Robert Lorimer’s work in 1968, and he contributed articles on this subject to a number of journals including Country Life. This study began with Lorimer’s drawings and papers and widened to his buildings, gardens and furniture and, finally, to his writings, which reveal so much of the inner feelings of this richly diverse designer.

Married with six children, for the last thirty-five years Dr Savage has divided his time between Edinburgh and South East France.